from the some-computer-game dept

Last year there were a bunch of stories about various police overreacting to "bomb scares" that turned out to be something entirely innocent. The most famous was the "mooninite" that shut down the city of Boston for a while. While some make the argument that police can never "overreact" to a potential bomb threat, the real problem was less in how they reacted on the scene, but how they followed through afterwards -- even once they realized that there was no actual bomb and there was no ill intent from the folks who placed the devices. Rather than chalking it up to a misunderstanding, they insist on considering these illegal hoaxes -- even if there was no hoax at all, but just a misunderstanding.

With that in mind, it will be interesting to see how New Zealand police end up dealing with a similar situation in Auckland, where there was a bomb scare over a device seen hanging off a railing at an intersection. The police shut down the street to call in the bomb squad to examine the device, which turned out to just be a geocache that someone had set up. Amusingly, the news report on the situation refers to geocaching as a "computer game," suggesting no familiarity with (and, of course, no attempt to understand) what geocaching actually is about. So far, the police don't seem to be reacting in the same manner as the Boston police, though they do say that whoever left the geocache "should have known better."